At a personal level I was already predisposed to find Gordon’s hypothesis persuasive, having been won over by Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation argument. Given that I enjoy a good historical read I am now also looking forward to Gordon’s Beyond the Rainbow: The American Standard of Living since the Civil War. However, I am a bit surprised at how little scrutiny Gordon’s handling of the data has received. The core chart he presents is this one:

Now, I have tried to replicate his nice steps using Maddison’s data.It is difficult.He certainly must have selected his year brackets very carefully to get such a neat downward step pattern.Even after trying to smooth the data by taking the rolling 20-year average per capita growth rate I get the following much messier picture:

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Ignoring the utopian presumption that the electronic age is anything more than a continuation of the 2nd revolution, the most obvious here is that marginal returns from technological change are approaching... a low number.

Explains why there's so much money playing the zero sum markets game and so little performing the task of reducing wealth disparity.